About Me

I first learned to weave in the USA while working in Boston, MA as a Geographic Information Systems Analyst (GIS to avoid the mouthful!) My first loom, which I still use, was a Harrisville 50″ wide 8-shaft floor loom. Today it feels like an extension of myself; I love weaving on it! That loom has travelled with me to Europe and now to England where I live and work in the beautiful Yorkshire Dales.

Laura’s Loom became ‘official’ in 2002 when I moved to Sedbergh on the edge of Cumbria, where the Lake District meets the Yorkshire Dales and where I opened a studio at Farfield Mill, a former spinning and weaving mill now renovated into a vibrant Arts and Heritage Centre. The fit seemed auspicious. After 10 years of weaving as an occasional hobby fitted in around work and family I had the opportunity to focus on it full time and so I made the most of it, weaving lots of scarves and trying out lots of fibres, designs and colours.

In 2004 I undertook the ‘Bradford Course’, an HNC in Handwoven Design at Bradford College where I was pushed out of my comfort zone but started to truly experiment, trying new ideas and being as weird and wacky as I liked. Out of this course came my stonewall series of scarves and throws, which I’m still working on. A tweak here, a tweak there and the whole thing changes. I find this endlessly fascinating!

I have more recently added a new loom to my studio, a 16-shaft LeClerc Weavebird which I am sure will provide me with a lifetime of experimentation as I learn to play with more blocks and in more than one dimension.